Information technology is changing rapidly and now forms an invisible layer that increasingly touches nearly every aspect of business and social life. An emerging computer model known as cloud computing addresses the explosive growth of Internet-connected devices, and complements the increasing presence of technology in today's world. Cloud computing is a model of service delivery for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, network bandwidth, servers, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or interaction with a provider of the service.
Cloud computing is massively scalable, provides a superior user experience, and is characterized by new, Internet-driven economics. In one perspective, cloud computing involves storage and execution of business data inside a cloud which is a mesh of inter-connected data centers, computing units and storage systems spread across geographies.
More specifically, with the advent of cloud computing, concepts such as storage clouds have emerged. The storage clouds are a network of storage which can be shared by users without the need for them to manage the storage infrastructure. A storage cloud provider typically caters to the users from all over the globe, and the storage infrastructure may be spread across geographies to serve the users in their local regions. Thus, the storage cloud provider may place data storage centers in different geographical locations.
When a user requests his or her data from a storage cloud for a computing device (e.g., a mobile device), the request has to pass through a number of routers, networks, and/or other processing elements in a data path. Due to this routing process, it takes longer to serve the data to the user as the distance between the user and a physical location of the data increases. Thus, when the user changes his or her location (e.g., from his or her home location to an intermediate or final travel location), data transfer speed also varies. If the user constantly needs to travel away from the home location, the user may have to suffer from slower data transfer rates due to delayed responses over the network. Further, the user may be transferring unnecessary data from the home location to a new travel location since all of the data in the storage cloud may not be required by the user at a time.